Services | Ecosystem Services

The concept of ecosystem services has been developed to aid our understanding of the human use and management of natural resources.

Our health and wellbeing depends upon the services provided by ecosystems and their components: water, soil, nutrients and organisms. Therefore, ecosystem services are the processes by which the environment produces resources used by humans such as clean air, water, food and materials (http://www.ecosystemservices.org.uk). Some such services, such as pollination by bees and the role of upland peatlands in the storage of carbon, have had a high profile in the UK recently.

Ecosystem services can be defined in various ways. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (http://www.maweb.org/en/index.aspx) provided the most comprehensive assessment of the state of the global environment to date; it classified ecosystem services as follows:

Supporting services: The services that are necessary for the production of all other ecosystem services including soil formation, photosynthesis, primary production, nutrient cycling and water cycling;

The application of ecosystem services in the UK is at an early stage but at Peak Ecology, we are very interested in particular, in how assessments of ecosystem services can be captured within Ecological Impact Assessment.

If you are interested in any of our services, don’t hesitate to contact us >>